Senior executives generally agree that crafting strategy is one of the most important parts of their job.

As a result, most companies invest significant time and effort in a formal, annual strategic-planning process that typically culminates in a series of business unit and corporate strategy reviews with the CEO and the top management team.

Yet the extraordinary reality is that few executives think this time-consuming process pays off, and many CEOs complain that their strategic-planning process yields few new ideas and is often fraught with politics.

The annual strategy review frequently amounts to little more than a stage on which business unit leaders present warmed-over updates of last year's presentations, take few risks in broaching new ideas, and strive above all to avoid embarrassment.

Rather than preparing executives to face the strategic uncertainties ahead or serving as the focal point for creative thinking about a company's vision and direction, the planning process &quot;is like some primitive tribal ritual,&quot; one executive told us.

&quot;There is a lot of dancing, waving of feathers, and beating of drums. No one is exactly sure why we do it, but there is an almost mystical hope that something good will come out of it.&quot;

Real strategies are rarely made in paneled conference rooms but are more likely to be cooked up informally and often in real time—in hallway conversations, casual working groups, or quiet moments of reflection on long airplane flights.

What then is the purpose, if any, of a formal planning process?

The first is to build &quot;prepared minds&quot;—that is, to make sure that decision makers have a solid understanding of the business, its strategy, and the assumptions behind that strategy, thereby making it possible for executives to respond swiftly to challenges and opportunities as they occur in real time.

The second goal is to increase the innovativeness of a company's strategies. No strategy process can guarantee brilliant flashes of creative insight, but much can be done to increase the odds that they will occur.

Most companies have an annual cycle of strategic-planning reviews that typically culminate in a presentation to the board. While the process itself might be quite formal, at its heart it is just a series of meetings. The trick is to transform them from the &quot;dog-and-pony shows&quot; that many companies now experience into true conversations that prepare the minds of the executive team for real-time strategy making in the year ahead.

Start with a commonsense approach about who should attend. Real conversations take place not in large groups but in small gatherings of no more than ten.

Above all, companies should avoid combining strategy reviews with discussions of budgets and financial targets, because when the two are considered together, short-term financial issues dominate at the expense of long-term strategic ones.

The two are then coupled in a rolling annual cycle; the financial plan is an input for the strategy discussion, which in turn is an input for the next financial plan.

It was very clear, among the best-practice companies we studied, that those who carry out strategy must also make it. Business unit heads can be supported by staff and consultants but cannot outsource strategy making to them.

A common question is how much guidance the corporate center should give the business units in preparing for these meetings. The answer is, &quot;enough but not too much.“

Insist on a few basics, such as an analysis of customers, competitors, and economics. At the same time, every business unit should be given plenty of latitude, for two reasons:

First, each is different, and simply asking all of the business units to fill out the same strategy template is likely to obscure more than it reveals.

Second, strategy reviews are a great way for the CEO to check the quality of the management team, and excessive corporate guidance makes it hard to tell the real strategists from those who are merely good at filling out templates.

For the type of formal strategy review described above, success isn't measured by the number of breakthrough ideas it produces. Rather, success is more modestly measured by how well the review helps management forge a common understanding of its environment, challenges, opportunities, and economics, thus laying the groundwork for better real-time strategic decision making going forward.

Unfortunately, our research showed that even when such calendar-driven processes are done well, they tend to produce &quot;in-the-box&quot; strategies. The calendar-driven process is necessary but not sufficient, and additional actions are needed to spur strategic creativity.

Creative thinking cannot be forced. Companies can, however, create conditions in which creative accidents are more likely to happen. We identified two mechanisms by which companies increase the odds of promoting creative accidents in strategy: encouraging bottom-up experiments and driving top-down initiatives.

Strategic experimentation occurs when a company pursues a variety of strategic options in parallel within a given business.

Some of the strategic options being tested may compete with current strategies or even be contradictory with one another. But they are not random experiments; they are all built around the core competencies of the business and designed to test specific hypotheses about where future opportunities may be found.

Top-down: Drive crosscutting themes:

The common ground among the various approaches is that senior corporate leaders identify issues that call for creative thinking and then deliberately disrupt the normal organizational structures in order to encourage focus and new perspectives on these issues.

While the formal annual planning process must ultimately be owned and driven by the CEO, it is the planning group that should design and run it or, as one executive said, should serve as the &quot;conveners of the conversations.&quot;

Many planning groups also wish to be internal consultants helping the business units analyze strategic issues and undertake special projects. We found that this role can be played successfully, but the groups doing so tend to be small and have very high quality people—typically, rising stars on temporary rotation from the business units rather than permanent staff.

This small pool of strategy talent can also be very useful to the CEO and the top team for executing special projects and for preparing for analyst meetings and board presentations.